Quotes About Perception

What neither the reader nor Stone would accept was that his self-amputation was as much and act of conceit as it was an act of heroism" p 61

You needed a guide. You had to know what to look for, but also how to look. You had to exert yourself to see this world. But if you did, if you had that kind of curiosity, if you had an innate interest in the welfare of your fellow human beings, and if you went through that door, a strange thing happened: you left your petty troubles on the threshold. It could be addictive.

Koshy Saar's response is indignant. "It's fiction! Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!

After just a week in the hospital, I felt I'd left America for another country. My world was a land of fluorescent lights where day and night were the same, and where more than half the citizens spoke Spanish. When they spoke English it wasn't what I expected in the land of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The bloodlines from the Mayflower hadn't trickled down to this zip code. Three

The fact that people were attentive to his body does not compensate for their ignoring his being.

Sometimes, if you think you're sick, you will be.

Child, the past is past, and furthermore it's different every time I remember it.

As if my past life was revealed to be a waste, a gesture in slow motion, because what I considered scarce and precious was in fact plentiful and cheap, and what I counted as rapid progress turned out to be glacially slow. The

But such memories are woven from gossamer threads; time eats holes in the fabric, and these she must darn with myth and fable.

In all my years here, no one's been able to remember my name when I'm introduced. No one has bothered. They usually see us as types, not as individuals." His

Luther did not believe that HIV was killing him. He believed that our inability to treat the symptoms that bothered him, our prescribing the wrong medications, was at the root of his problem. I almost believed him: Maybe if we could put together the right concoctions we could give him ten good years.

The voyage of discovery is not about new lands, but having new eyes.

A woman with unconventional beauty raises the hope that the viewer might be the only one to see it, that in recognizing and appreciating it, he alone has created her beauty.

The Arabs had the dry, musty smell of a grain cellar; the Asians contributed the ginger and garlic; and from the whites came the odor of a milk-soaked bib.

Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion

But for a four-year-old, everything is sacred and ordinary.

God's time isn't the same as hers. God's calendar isn't the one hanging in her kitchen.

just as she kept her thoughts to herself, I was learning to do the same. This was what growing up was about: hide the corpse, don't bare your heart, do make assumptions about the motives of others. They're certainly doing all these things to you. I

The mistake, Digby, of choosing to see more in your future mate than the evidence has already suggested.

He thinks of his loving sister, and the narrow, confined life she lived that never seemed that way to her, and how much she enriched their lives. He was her "precious baby," never aging for her, just as she never aged. Strangers might feel sorry for Baby Mol, but if they'd understood how happy she was, how fully she lived in the present, inhabiting each second, they'd have been envious.

In this upside down world, snarls are smiles, ugly is beautiful, and the crippled outwork the able bodied, but tears are the same.

What she thought was her life is all maya, all illusion, but it is one shared illusion. And what else can she do but go on.

By the time they return to the lodge in the late afternoon, they've seen so many white men—sa'ippus—and even white women, that Baby Mol no longer wants to touch them to see if the color comes off.

Rune, smiling, reenters the illusion that is the world.